Future and Outlook: Where Are We, and Where Will the Spatial Information Management in Wildlife Ecology Be in 50 Years from Now?

Abstract

In this final chapter we briefly look back over what we have attempted in this book, and then look toward the future to discuss the outlook for overcoming the challenges we face within our fields of ecological science and in the greater application of this knowledge to enhance the prospect for a sustainable future for the biosphere. Looking back, we have tried to present a view of ecological science at the cusp of major change. The change is all around us, driven by vast improvements in computational power, analytical tools, spatial databases, economy and related governance structures within the sciences. These changes have fundamentally altered what is possible in ecological analysis and are enabling a new synthesis and applications of data and method to recast ecological theory in a spatially and temporally explicit framework. In this book we argued that ecological theory and its dissemination is lagging significantly behind advances in data acquisition and analytical methodology. This is in part because of the inertia and resistance of established procedure and theory, and secondly because of the way the sciences are currently administered and trained.